Using vector graphics as navigation icons has always made perfect sense.
But it seemed to be the arrival of the retina screen (2011-ish) that really lit a rocket under the idea.
Almost overnight icons that had looked fine on standard screens suddenly looked like they'd been brutally hacked from an old newspaper with rusty pocketknife. The minor niggles we might have had with scalable vectors suddenly seemed well worth tackling.
At the time – as the case is today – there were two ways to deliver vectors to browser and each had their pros and cons.
Although both technologies had been around for a long time, web fonts seemed to grab the early lead. Many of us were already comfortable working with fonts, and there's no doubt that plug-n-play solutions like FontAwesome made getting started that much easier.
But things have been changing over the past year or so.
While people are beginning to appreciate the power and flexibility of SVG, some of the 'gotchas' attached to icon fonts have become more apparent. These include:
We can now add a handful of new items to that list.
A couple of weeks ago Seren Davies (@Ninjanails) gave a talk at the London Web Standards group called 'Death to Icon Fonts'. Seren is dyslexic and detailed some of the issues that icon fonts introduce to her browsing experience.
Font choice has a huge bearing on readability for dyslexic users. Ironically, for all the disdain that Comic Sans has attracted over the years, it's often cited as one of the most readable typefaces for dyslexic users.
This has meant that it's very common practice for dyslexic readers to override the default font on a site with their own more readable font - perhaps something like OpenDyslexic.
And this is where we hit problems.
To speed things up, font icons are generally bundled into a single site-wide font that also contains the alphanumeric characters. The icons are placed in an undesignated 'private' section of the font.
When a user overrides this font, they replace the alphanumeric characters but there are no replacements for these custom icons. We get left with big, ugly, unhelpful empty boxes instead.
Continue reading %The Final Nail in the Icon Fonts Coffin?%
As a front end developer I often find myself creating rich UI’s for my side projects with frameworks like Angular and React but there comes a point where your app needs data, persistence, business logic, email and a whole host of other behaviours that are usually the domain of back-end developers. Stamplay is a service […]
Continue reading %Creating a Fully-featured Book Club App with Stamplay%
Yesterday morning I spent an enlightening hour hosting Ruth Ellison in our Campfire chatroom for a session on Customer Journey Mapping. It was one of the most popular sessions that I’ve run to date, and Ruth’s form was fantastic. The questions came thick and fast but she didn’t let it phase her!
Ruth is a Principal user experience designer working at PwC’s Experience Centre, in Canberra, Australia.
She is extremely passionate about creating accessible and inclusive user experiences and is fascinated by the way humans interact with each other and with web and computer systems.
If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions. If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.
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The post Transcript: Ask the UXperts: Customer Journey Mapping with Ruth Ellison appeared first on UX Mastery .  by Sarah Hawk via UX Mastery |
The last time we looked at the best programming languages to learn in 2015, JavaScript, Java, PHP and Python appeared good options when you analyze popularity on sites such as GitHub and StackOverflow.
Alternatively, perhaps we can determine the "best" technologies to learn from job-related metrics such as demand and salaries? Career planning company Gooroo examines more than 500,000 IT vacancies throughout the US, UK and Australia to produce their 2015 salaries and demand report.
The following technologies feature most strongly in job vacancy advertisements:
These are worldwide statistics which will have a US bias owing to its larger market. C# hits the top spot in the UK (32%) while JavaScript wins in Australia (13%).
The following technologies all pay more than $100,000, with Erlang developers earning an average of $125,000 USD per year:
Interestingly, only Python appears in both lists. Does that make it the best option?
Before you knock down your boss's door to demand a pay rise and Python re-training, Gooroo discloses:
The report is interesting, contains useful information and reaches reasonable conclusions. Unfortunately, demand and salary statistics are misleading unless you appreciate the underlying data. The following issues should be noted…
Recruitment is expensive. Agencies typically charge 25% of first year salary to find suitable applicants so they can can afford to purchase adverts in online and offline media.
This explains why Java (18%) and C# (16%) feature prominently. Neither is better than competing languages but large corporations invest in them because:
Smaller companies may have more vacancies and similar salaries for PHP, Node.js or Ruby. However, they will be less willing or able to pay hefty recruitment fees. Their adverts are less noticeable, so the results are skewed accordingly.
Continue reading %The Best Language to Learn in 2015: Job Demand and Salaries%
In this short video, I'll look at how Python handles control flow. This consist of if/else combinations along with elif. I'll also see which common control flow structure Python is missing and how to get around it.
Continue reading %Video: Conditional Flows in Python%
Vue.js is a JavaScript library that helps you build web applications that conform to the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architectural pattern. At first glance, it might seem quite similar to AngularJS, but once you start working with it, you’ll quickly realize that Vue.js is not only much simpler and easier to learn, but definitely more flexible.
In this introductory tutorial, I’ll teach you the basic concepts of Vue.js, trying to do a complete overview of its most important features.
Though you can get the latest release of Vue.js from GitHub, you would find much easier to load it from a CDN. Here’s the procedure to load it from cdnjs:
[code language="html"]
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In Vue.js, view-models are created using the Vue class. If you are wondering what a view-model is, you can think of it as an object that makes it very easy for you to display your model’s data inside a view (you can treat any object literal as a model, and any HTML UI element as a view).
Continue reading %Getting Started With Vue.js%
